[heads]

That is brilliant, thank you so much for sharing. The galaxies’ enormous size is truly jaw dropping. I had absolutely no idea they were this large, in the night sky.

Have you ever seen them live, though an image intensifier / night vision system? I feel there would be something profound about seeing a galaxy with my own (albeit enhanced) eyes.

[dheera]

I don't have a night vision system so haven't tried that on Markarian's chain. What is much easier for naked eye vision is the Andromeda galaxy, which is much closer. It is actually about 6 times the visual size of a full moon in the sky, though with naked eye in a dark enough place you can barely see the fuzzy blob of a core with off-center vision. You can see the core more clearly with binoculars. However it will look small because you are only looking at the core. The magnificant spiral arms are what extend around that core 6 times the size of a moon. You can easily see the spiral structure with a consumer full frame camera. A star tracker will produce a crystal clear image of it, but without a tracker, a short exposure and high ISO can still show its existence. Even a 50mm or 100mm lens is enough to make it out. At 500mm it will fill the whole frame almost corner-to-corner. It's huge.

Keep in mind galaxies are extremely low density on average. So even though Andromeda has about 1 trillion stars, it's still mostly vacuum with lightyears of distance between adjacent stars inside it. So it appears much, much, much dimmer than the individual stars in the sky from our own galaxy.

[RHSman2]

I am lucky enough to live in a place that I can see the night sky as it should be. It takes time to be able ‘see’ the Milky Way. And what made it easy to understand was seeing andromeda through binoculars.

Realising that if I was in andromeda looking back at the Milky Way it would look the same. I could then understand that I wasn’t looking at the Milky Way, but part of it and looking out.

Really grounded me.

[dylan604]

The only time I've seen things is from using one of Sony's mirrorless cameras with ultra high ISO while attached directly to a telescope. Things that would normally take long exposures were visible in realtime. I haven't tried using that with a wide angle lens. Would be interesting thing to try